Pizza Hut in Catonsville, MD... I think it's still there. Rents used to cash in my book-it cards there, and I thought it was a night at the Apollo.. got all dressed up for a night on the town, we had waiters, beer for my dad, sodas for the kids, pizza for everyone.. we weren't the only ones there. The place was packed on a Friday night.. I feel like it had a wait as long as a wait at a Cheesecake Factory on Saturday nights are nowadays..... sigh. I think I'll pack my kids up and go to the pizza hut this Friday.. the one off of 108 in columbia. Pay it forward.

Holy crap Burger chefs have not been around in eons. This thread has potential as a bookmark..I should go out and take pictures of a Bar that was a Pizza hut, a Taco Bell that is a vet, and two Arbys that are now a chepo loans place and a Tire rims store

First wait job was at a pizza hut. Learned that not everyone tipped no matter how great the service was. Family. Large, expensive (for pizza hut) order. Kids. Milk spilled. Cheerfully and efficiently cleaned and re-set the table and provided fresh new drinks. Ring of food scraps and napkins around the table thrown by kids. I start hurling napkins around looking for my big tip. Nothing. Nothing.

Learned to profile the tippers. Blue collar? Previous tipper? Bikers? You can all sit in my section. Families and church people, ladies who lunch, you can sit in some other section. You'll get professional service, but I'm not wasting any extra energy on you.

CSB: I've been to both Freeport McDonalds and Dachau... Didn't eat at Dachau McDonnalds though. Dachau concentration camp was filled with Italian teenagers making out, being loud and generally not giving a fark... So lord knows what they're like at McDonnalds...

/did go to McD in Berlin though, wanted a soda with ice.//Germans love David Hasselhoff///Germand hate beverages with ice.

peasandcarrots:I kind of wish Pizza Hut had kept the old design. When I was a kid, I remember the Hut near our home as being kind of a warm and inviting place. It might be nostalgia glasses; when you're that age, anywhere with subdued lighting, burgundy carpets, vinyl-covered menus, and a salad bar was a "warm and inviting place." Your mileage may vary.

The complete collapse of Pizza Hut's customer service seems to have been simultaneous with their doing away with the red roof design. There's a "Pizza Hut Bistro" not far from where I live now that actually forgets they have a dining room every once in a while; as a steady stream of pick-up customers arrives for their orders, you could set off a bottle rocket in the lobby and still not get anyone's attention. A couple of times, out of perverse fascination and nothing-better-to-do-ism (usually when reading a good book) I would actually see how long it took to get noticed by staff after being seated. The record is 65 minutes. It's astonishing how little you can give a damn for your clients and still have a functioning business. Were they bought out by Bain Capital at one point?

There's a building in my town that was originally a Hot N Now that only lasted about a year, then became an office building for a credit union for about a decade, and is now being converted into a Krispy Kreme.

[bloximages.chicago2.vip.townnews.com image 300x228]

don't forget the former pizza hut down the street that's now 24 hour mexican (get the carne asada burrito. seriously), the taco bell that's now the great wall, the kwik shoppe that's now a mexican joint, and all the converted gas stations around town.

Right on! Greasy burgers and "super thick" shakes that were watery as hell. And awesome. My hometown had one that is now a different chain restaurant. They still have the same glass doors with pull handles with the burger chef logo. If I'm ever back there with a pair of vice grips and a wrench those farkers are mine.

The only Shakey's I ever saw was outside of Louisville. It turned in to a Bonnie and Clyde's pizza about 1980 and I think still is. Good times there when I was a kid. It's not too far from the Waverly Hills Sanatorium if you've ever seen anything about that creepy place.

Really? They moved the dine in Hut here to a smaller delivery express type take out earlier last year and they yanked the classic Hut roof off the old building in half a day. I had no idea it was a facade on top of a normal peaked roof. The goofy windows are still there so it is a bit Huttish.

For many years starting in the 1930s, the Baltimore/Washington area had its own local burger stand called Little Tavern. It was very similar in style to White Castle, with an emphasis on slider-sized burgers ("buy 'em by the bag," the motto went). By the early 1990s, they started to disappear, but old locations are ridiculously easy to spot due to the restaurants' small size (barely more than a shed) and iconic, green-roofed "Tudor house" styling.

Because of the unique architecture, there's really not many things you can repurpose an old "Club LT" into, and the majority have wound up as donut shops, or cheap Chinese restaurants. And a couple of Subways, I think, since apparently you can franchise a Subway into any building with at least two and a half walls.

The windows (or more correctly the pillars on each side of them) are pizza slice shaped. It's one of the ways that you can tell it used to be a Pizza Hut. The roof is the other main one but that type of roof was also used by other business types so it's not a definitive tell-tale.

I find old Taco Bells to be especially amusing when they get repurposed as actual Mexican restaurants.

Meanwhile, a town near me has a "Classic" Pizza Hut that's been a variety of other restaurants. At one point, it was a German restaurant, and featured German city crests on the outside, in between the obvious Pizza Hut trapezoidal windows. When that folded, it became a Mexican restaurant, but it took them a long time before they stripped away the German decor.

The actual Pizza Hut moved down the street a quarter mile at least 20 years ago, but sometime recently it closed. I'm surprised they stayed in business as long as they did, considering there are already a couple of great pizza joints in town.

Gotfire:emersonbiggins: Nickerson Farms, anyone? You've all seen one somewhere.

[img.fark.net image 640x454]

There's one on interstate 35 in Texas near the Oklahoma border that is now a pr0n store with a huge "XXX" emblazoned on the roof. It's for the truckers who like to get their jack off on while hauling garbage to put on the shelves of your local Wal Mart.

Many of the former Stuckey's locations in Illinois are now pr0n shops. I refer to them as "Stickey's."

/TIL the Firefox spell checker considers "pr0n" as a valid word - no wavy red line under it

This guy I was stationed with at Glenview NAS told me Pizza Huts were designed so the manager could stand at the back door and supervise the whole place. I wondered what I was going to do with that information 30 years ago when he told me.

There is a former Stuckey's in Manteno (maybe) that is now an adult business. We called it "Sticky's" and a gas station that I had the poor fortune to work at for about a month is now an adult shop. It's in Edgewood Illinois.

I remember back when I was a kid, in the 70s..or was it 80s...and my parents used to take me to this cheap, plastic dump where we'd order sugar water by the pitcher, and gorge on salty cardboard with melted vinyl on it.